Zoya Phan: the face of Burmese protest

Zoya Phan recalls how she fled the jungle to become the most powerful
political activist for Burma living in Britain.

Zoya Phan: Not until I came to the UK did I learn the truth of what was happening in my own countryPhoto: JEFF GILBERT

By Elizabeth Grice

7:00AM BST 06 May 2009

Destiny is a big, portentous, overworked word. Zoya Phan never once uses it. But for her followers it is the only way to make sense of how she escaped persecution in the Burmese jungle and became, aged only 28, a human rights campaigner in the mould of her assassinated father, and the most powerful political activist for Burma living in Britain.

Zoya, whose memoir Little Daughter has just been published in Britain, is a member of the Karen tribe, the second largest ethnic group in Burma. She is so small, so softly spoken and shy, that it is hard to believe she can rouse audiences to anger and to tears when she highlights the atrocities still being committed in her country – or that she poses such a threat to the ruling dictatorship that she is on a hit list herself.

She was brought up in a bamboo hut on stilts. The nearest clinic was several miles' trek through the jungle. She and her brothers and sister foraged for food to supplement a diet of rice and fish paste, and yet, until the bombs began to fall, her memoir of survival is as much about a lost arcadia as it is about poverty. Most of her childhood was spent in blissful ignorance of the military junta's encroachment on her homeland – or the reason for her father's long, mysterious absences. But the prelapsarian idyll ended when she was 13 and the Burmese army attacked her village, torching houses and burning crops.

For two years, she dodged capture, enslavement and torture, hiding in the jungle with thousands of other displaced people and ending up in a Thai refugee camp. Her mother, a former guerrilla, eked out an existence for them through desperate times, while her father – by all accounts a charismatic leader – was away working for the Karen resistance.

In one of the camps, Zoya acquired a basic education from a Canadian teacher and eventually won a scholarship to study in Bangkok. In 2005, still being hunted by the military, she fled to Britain on false papers and claimed asylum – a procedure as humiliating as it was protracted. Despite having no computer skills and no formal refugee status, she enrolled at the University of East Anglia to take an MA in politics and development. At this stage, she was still learning how to use a knife and fork, still baffled by kettles, showers and washing machines – and so politically naive that she knew almost nothing about Burma's pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. "It sounds strange, but not until I came to the UK did I learn the truth of what was happening in my own country."

At a "Free Burma" march in London to mark the 60th birthday of Aung San Suu Kyi, Zoya, dressed all in white, was the only person wearing traditional Karen costume. A journalist and photographer came alongside her. Someone thrust a heavy, funnel-shaped device into her hands and asked her to introduce the speakers. "It's a megaphone," he explained. In one afternoon, she became the face and voice of an enslaved nation.

Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, remembers the dramatic impression this tiny girl made. "Zoya stood out from the start," he recalls. "She was outside the Burmese Embassy in full Karen dress speaking over a loudhailer. She was so confident, witty and articulate, we were very surprised to learn that it was her first demonstration." A week later, she was interviewed on Newsnight. Farmaner persuaded her – with difficulty – that she could do more to help the Karen people from London, working for his organisation, than on the border with Thailand. "This white man is crazy, I thought. What's he talking about?" But she had already attracted the attention of the Burmese security services and knew that it was not safe to return.

She was invited to speak at the 2006 Conservative Party conference – and again in 2007 – but on first meeting her, the organisers worried that they had made a mistake: how could someone so slight, so quiet, address 3,000 people? "She blew them away," says Farmaner. "There was a standing ovation."

Her father, Padoh Mahn Sha Lah Phan, lived to know that people were talking about his "little daughter" and was proud that she had started to work for freedom. But his enemies were closing in. He had survived several assassination attempts, three of them when she was with him. On one occasion, two Burmese boy soldiers he had "adopted" were captured, tortured by military intelligence agents and instructed to kill father and daughter with bayonets while they were having breakfast. But one boy disappeared and the other confessed to the plot. Later, a roadside bomb was laid for her father's car but villagers were given warning of it. And at a political meeting, two assassins were captured just before they could strike. "If they can't get me, they will try to get you," he warned her.

On her last clandestine visit home, it was Zoya's turn to urge her father, then general secretary of the Karen National Union, to be vigilant. "I told him that Benazir Bhutto was shot because she didn't take security seriously enough," she says. "He replied: 'Even if they tried to kill me, they wouldn't kill my spirit.' He told me he was tired, he was feeling old. He was ready to face whatever might come." Not long after she returned to England, Padoh Man Sha was shot on the verandah of his house in Mae Sot by three men in a pick-up truck.

"He was my hero, my leader, my greatest man," she says. "He was humble, a man of principle, committed to human rights and democracy. He was killed because they feared him. I knew I couldn't let what he believed in die." She travelled back home to pay her last respects, staying with his body all night but not daring to attend the funeral. "As dawn rose, my sister and I had to creep away. It was the hardest decision we had ever had to make." In public, she shed no tears.

Farmaner says that her inner strength was remarkable. "Instead of being comforted by friends and colleagues of her father, it was the other way round. People took strength and courage from her."

Their expectations, she says, are palpable, but she is not weighed down by them. It sounds as though she is gradually accepting the significance of being named by her father after a young Second World War Soviet resistance worker, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.

Farmaner says it was some time before Zoya Phan could be persuaded that her story was a way of drawing attention to Burmese oppression. "She says 'I am lucky'. She is always thinking about other people, those still suffering in Burma or the refugee camps in Thailand. Most people who have been through what she has would be in therapy by now, or bitter and angry. Somehow she isn't."

In August 2007, after two years, she was granted full refugee status in Britain. "It made me feel safe for the first time in more than a decade," she says. "Since the age of 14, I had been a ghost citizen. I had no ID card, no passport, no identity. I was 26 years old. My time as a non-person was over. Finally, I could open a bank account, work, rent a home and eventually travel."

The only possession that has survived from her harried existence is a small, black-and-white family snapshot, taken on a rare day of togetherness in front of their bamboo homestead in the shade of a tamarind tree. It is the book's one illustration. "My father and my mother never had a peaceful life," she says. "It was one of sacrifice and struggle. Though they hid it from us, they lived in fear. They showed us how to survive and to be strong."

Though her movements are monitored by the Burmese government, Zoya Phan displays a similar lack of fear. She rents a flat in north London. Once, she was attacked as she approached her front door, but her only concession to personal safety since then has been to take a course in "hostile environment training". All her energy is funnelled outwards – into shaming the international community into cutting off support for a corrupt regime; criticising the United Nations for not intervening to stop the ethnic cleansing in eastern Burma; and campaigning for more humanitarian aid. Like every other exile, her dream is to return home. Unlike most, she could help make it happen.

• 'Little Daughter: A Memoir of Survival in Burma and the West' by Zoya Phan (Simon & Schuster) is available from Telegraph Books for £13.99 plus £1.25 p&p. Call 0844 871 1515 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk